I have been following Steampunk for a while, it is an interesting concept... How do you distill it down? What is it all about?
Having just attended the Steampunk festival in Port Townsend, USA, it was aptly called the "Brass Screw Consortium". A bunch of fun people with a great perspective on life. Rather extroverted and boy, do they love to dress up!
The fun new word I learned was "Bodgers". They take old stuff and make fun stuff out of it, that looks like old machinery or electrical Tesla machines with lights that sparkle and move.
They have tea ceremonies, fun musical instruments, and bells on their legs when they dance.
They all have wonderful English Elizabethan names, costumes and connotations The world as it could have been, with lots of cogs, brass, bustiers and dancing.
So what is my read..?
Firstly, it is all about "crossroads" & "what if's"? What could have happened - if only?
Back in the late 1800's & early 1900's, the world was going in an exciting direction. There was science fiction, great authors like HG Wells, telling amazing stories.
it was all about a brilliant future, crazy creatures, journeys to the moon, to the bottom of the ocean, the centre of the earth, following the "hydrogen" path to flight. It invented the hydrogen airship, a luxury liner in the air.
It built amazing steam engines that could power ships, tractors, winches, cars, sawmills, all manner of equipment to make horses redundant as workers and be returned to creatures of beauty. It would transform agriculture and transportation with trains and trucks.
Mary Valley Rattler, Gympie, Queensland, Australia.
Steam was the pre-eminent force back then and they were branching out to hydrogen, the most abundant source of energy in the universe.
It was light and could easily lift objects off the ground. The big drawback was it was difficult to produce and volatile, being highly flammable. The bond was hard to break with water and it wanted to rush back to water as soon as possible, creating heat. It was the cleanest energy source on the planet and in the universe, but that chemical bond was a super big problem.
However, hydrogen was lighter than air and the scientists at the time thought it was great, so built the 'Hindenburg', a massive airship. They even built internal combustion engines for it. But because of one major screw-up, on its maiden voyage to the US, the 'Hindenburg', burned to the ground with major loss of life due to "static electricity", all wonderfully published in real-time on the latest invention - radio news!
Needless to say that was the end of hydrogen as a lighter than air, clean energy source. Never to be forgotten to this day.
Henry Ford in his wisdom decided to follow the safe "oil money" and built the internal combustion engine, because of the abundance of this cheap source of energy and the recent discovery of oil in huge quantities in the US. The world was forever changed.
Steam was a lost cause, the internal combustion engine was the future.
The Americans became the pre-emptive industrial force in the world. Coal was abundant.
That was not a bad thing, but "Steampunk" is about 'imagining' the future as it 'might' have been.
This was a great video until the last 2 minutes. I will leave it at that... Monty
The costumes and the culture are about time standing still and imagining what would have been if the world had somehow stood still, England was in charge and steam was the only saviour of mankind and 'hydrogen' was the next step in the industrial revolution. What would it all have looked like?
It certainly would not look like today's chaotic world where everything is streamlined and ground down to the lowest common denominator.
There is no artistic beauty anymore.
Fashion is homogenous. Children are being told to be homogenous. Architecture is boring, dull and bland. Art is an expression of someone's opinion, not a thing of beauty.
Even our inventions lack flair and fun. The iPhone may be a marvel of human invention, but it lacks the character of old. Our lives have become vanilla.
They want us to become one homogenous race, a melting pot of coffee coloured people.
Steampunk reminds me of when individuality was valued. When innovation was respected, marvelled at, and celebrated. Today, we applaud conformity and are told not to question. We can no longer ask " Why? " and we dare not say " Why not? "
There is nothing sinister in Steampunk, it is just about the crossroads of life, taking the right fork in the road, not the left fork in the road, time moving in a certain direction and mankind embracing a future founded on the amazing premise of daring to dream.
